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Sony Announces the PS4
As many expected, Sony has officially announced the PS4 at the Sony PlayStation Meeting today. The new PlayStation will have an X86 processor, "state of the art" GPU, 8 GB of high-speed unified memory, and a hard drive for local storage. The PS4 will allow gamers to share their gameplay stream and even remotely take control of friend's games. Along with the PS4, Sony has unveiled a new DualShock 4 controller which features a built-in touchpad at the center of the controller, and a built-in microphone jack.
Cue the usual litany of complaints: Rootkits, OtherOS, proprietary this and that.
Hint: If you're in that boat, PS4 probably isn't for you. You don't have to buy it. You don't have to buy the new Xbox either, which will be equally restrictive.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
So what exactly is gonna differentiate this from a mid-level to high-end gaming rig?
It's not even surpassing a low to mid-level right these days. Welcome to the "lets carry it along" generation, instead of "lets improve it along."
Om, nomnomnom...
or as a component in a HPC cluster
The one thing that has kept consoles alive today was the fact that they weren't x86. You want to play Halo 4? Buy a '360, because the binaries are not only encoded but compiled for a completely different architecture (PowerPC). You want to play Killzone 2 or 3 or MGS4? Buy a PS3, because it's the same thing.
Now that they're pushing "supercharged PC architectures" (what the hell does that even mean?)- how long until we see a hypervisor or bootloader that fires up the next-gen console OS on a bog standard PC that otherwise has similar specifications to the equivalent console?
Sony must have some insane dedicated hardware security in that system, because if they don't and it's just a tiny little 8-pin TPM chip- someone is going to blow that thing wide open, and then there won't be any point to buying a PS4 at all. Just partition your existing PC or buy a spare $59 hard drive, stick the PS4 GameOS on that, and play all the PS3 "exclusives" without even owning a PS4.
I'm sure they were worried about piracy before, but man- I can't see how they're *not* shitting bricks over that right now with the switch to x86, unless they've got some killer hardware TPM coprocessor that is handling encryption and decryption on a SOC, completely self-contained and relatively unbreakable (until someone decaps the thing and reads out the bits under a microscope).
...and I wouldn't buy a Sony product if they paid me to take it. I have not forgotten what they do to their customers in the name of IP. Groklaw it.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The scuttlebutt I heard is it's an AMD Jaguar architecture APU with 8 cores, enhanced GCN architecture GPU, with 8GB of unified GDDR5.
Which would make for a console with mid-level to high-end gaming rig frame rates at resolutions PC gamers expect which we haven't had up till now.
I see no mention of whether or not there is an optical drive on this system. Obviously if they have no optical drive they have broken compatibility with existing titles from earlier playstations.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A dedicated gaming console doesn't have the desktop OS overhead to deal with. You can squeeze more out of less in this case. Especially with devs working to a fixed target.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
So what exactly is gonna differentiate this from a mid-level to high-end gaming rig?
Well for one it will protect you from accidentally installing Steam and being burdened with a huge library of inexpensive games!
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
The PS3 already allowed non-friends to take control of my bank account.
Which would make for a console with mid-level to high-end gaming rig frame rates at resolutions PC gamers expect which we haven't had up till now.
Yeah! Decent framerates at 1080p! Wooo! The future was a few years ago!
Set up an easily hackable system
Cry to the gov "they're hacking us dry"
Ger new draconian copyright/drm laws passed
????
Profit
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Why exactly would I give money to Sony?
* Rootkit fiasco
* Stripping Linux from the PS3
* Hotz Lawsuit
These and many many more.
Except there are not many more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal have a look its 7 years old, and recalling all the affected CDs. I'd rather give my money to Sony over Microsoft every time. In fact people seem to forget that Sony did this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc. As for the whole Linux thing, they should have been rewarded for doing so, and got the tax breaks associated with it. They didn't it got removed. The fact that we a licensing our devices rather than buying them is interesting considering how Microsoft & Apple are doing with *general purpose* devices.
The reality is Sony is by mega-corporations standards pretty good. Personally though I bought an OUYA as I believe in supporting companies, who release hardware that you *own*
And the same machine code as a PC. I'll just wait till someone writes an emulator.
That's not the point. The point is I paid for it and they removed it. It is not unlike a car owner taking his car in for an oil change and the manufacturer removing the radio... It's not the radio... it's the principle of Sony being jerks.
You can keep your PS4 and XBox 720. I am not interested. Save your fanboy slobbering for the Sony forums.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
So what exactly is gonna differentiate this from a mid-level to high-end gaming rig?
Using unified GDDR5 memory is going to be really interesting. They quote 176GB/s -- the DDR3 in your high-end gaming rig is pushing maybe 50GB/s. It's not going to excel at purely GPU-bound stuff compared to a PC, but for things which require the GPU and CPU to work together (like, say, games), it should be incredibly fast.
There's also the thing about OS overhead -- Windows/Linux do a lot to ensure the kernel won't be brought down by a driver/GPU failure. John Carmack and others have lamented about how terribly inefficient it is, and that it allows console games to look remarkably close to much higher-speced PCs.
Doesn't work like that. Frequency, instruction set efficiency, and parallel execution are different aspects of a modern processor. You can't just lump them all togeather and brand it an i5ish CPU. Which BTW is a false comparison anyways as an i5 has four real cores.
Life is not for the lazy.
Linux on the PS3 was terrible. Anyone that used it could have told you that.
Really??? Tell that to the US Air Force.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Is there really that much overhead?
I just ssh'd into my linux machine at work (which has a Gnome UI going) and ran top, and it says that 99.7% of the CPU is idle, with 0.25% used by top.
I'm on a Win 7 box right now (quad-core 2GHz Sandy Bridge laptop), with a gazillion Firefox etc. tabs open. The CPU may well not be running at its highest clock speed, but it reports about 10% CPU usage -- from "FlashPlayerPlugin.exe", presumably because I'm streaming 1080p video with no GPU assist on the decode. Firefox itself, along with "System", are using 1% CPU.
Actually this is the long-awaited stealth revival of IBM's PC division -- the PS/4. Internally it runs IBM's new Linux distribution, OS/4, and have the new integrated high-speed peripheral serial bus, MCA-Wire.
Those are *not* Bulldozer cores! They are more similar to the lower-end Jaguar cores that are going into AMD's tablet & netbook products. They are still a major step up from the actual cores in the Cell (those SPE things are not really "cores"), but even a Bulldozer core will be more powerful than these things on a clock for clock basis.
The good news is the GPU is pretty nice for this type of system and the power consumption should be quite good, so heat won't be an issue. Definitely a huge step up from PS3 hardware, and "console ports" won't suck so bad since this thing is basically a real PC.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Price. It will probably cost $500. A similarly equipped Windows PC would be $1,000+
Ease of use. No viruses. No configuring software and hardware. Guaranteed game performance.
Long life. 7+ yrs of life cycle with no upgrades to play all games.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Benchmark-wise, an FX 8350, the 8-core top-end Piledriver, is considered comparable to the i5 3570. The i5 generally takes a large lead in single-threaded performance, but the FX leads on the more parallel stuff. Still effectively a tie, especially with the mere $10 price difference. People I know tend to go Intel, since it's cooler and (if you spring $30 for the 3570K version) it overclocks better, but for most purposes they can be considered equivalents.
However, the 8350 is clocked at 4.0GHz, precisely twice that the PS4 is rumored to have (the detailed specs were not shown tonight, but the stuff that was matches up exactly with what the leaked specs claimed so I'm treating them as reasonably accurate). So it is a reasonable conclusion that the PS4 chip would run approximately half as fast as the FX-8350. Yes, cache hit rates, memory controller clocks and all that will affect it, but at the end of the day, the processor has to run instructions, and if it does that at half the rate, it's running slower. (And yes, you can compare the PS4 and FX clock-for-clock, because they're the same architecture (at least as far as my information goes)).
I simply used i3/i5 as a reference, as they are both more generic names than FX-4300/FX-8350, and Intel has a larger market share and brand awareness, so their labels make for better shorthand.
Looks roughly the same as a general-purpose PC, but scoped down to fewer purposes. It should be compatible with Sony's x86 rootkits however.
Benchmark-wise, an FX 8350, the 8-core top-end Piledriver,
Anand, who is almost always right about everything in the industry, seems to think these will be Jaguar (slower) cores rather than Piledriver. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6770/sony-announces-playstation-4-pc-hardware-inside
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Gaming PCs have a stonking great discrete GPU that plugs into the motherboard, and requires its own connection(s) to the PSU. Now what if this graphics card, with fantastically massive RAM bandwidths that Intel can only dream about, suddenly had EIGHT x86 CPU cores inserted into the GPU chip? What if this graphic card was given a 'Southbridge' chip for all the usual inputs and outputs found on the motherboard? Obviously, the graphics card would become the entire PC, with no need for the motherboard at all.
This is what AMD has created. NOT a CPU with inbuilt graphics that need to share a horrendously slow CPU bus (2x64 bits), but a GPU with inbuilt CPU cores, sharing an insanely fast GPU RAM bus, and using a common memory addressing model (HSA).
AMDs designs are light-years beyond those from Intel. Intel's great plan is to build a CPU with a massive companion RAM chip die for the GPU, just like the PlayStation 2 (yes TWO- you know that long obsolete console from many years ago). This Intel CPU is so mega-expensive, only ultra pricey laptops can afford to use it, but none will because ultra pricey laptops need graphics from ATI or Nvidia in order to sell. In other words, Intel's new Haswell GPU initiative is a bust before the first chip even hits the market.
Now the market awaits AMD to become really sane, and sell complete single board PC solutions that follow the design philosophy of the PS4- in other words a single board designed around the GPU, with 8GB of GPU memory soldered on, and the CPU cores contained within the GPU, leeching of the unified HSA GPU bus. Obviously these single-board PC systems can use far more powerful GPU designs than the PS4 because they will need far more power and cooling.
Now that the CPU no longer has to render graphics or decode video, the CPU is left with less and less to do on the PCs used by 99.9% of people, driving Intel's advantage into the ground. Metrics like GPU performance and memory bandwidth are increasingly important, even outside of games. The collapse of the price of DRAM means that memory should have been provided soldered to the motherboard years back, allowing much better quality of data signal = bigger possible bandwidth. Simple computer science 'cache' theory shows that very few people will benefit from more than 8GB, and this 8GB of DRAM should be acting as a level-4 cache to the SSD drive anyway.
Expect the new consoles to cause a massive re-think of the design of the desktop PC, to Intel's extreme disadvantage. Sony and MS are not mugs, and went to AMD for an entire PC-based solution for a very good reason. And both are building products designed to have a 7+ year lifetime.
Why do people, especially here, keep saying that you save money with a console? It may have other benefits (like not having to install game DRM on a general use machine, for family use, where the entertainment system should be isolated etc), but saving money is not one of them. You buy an EXTRA machine OVER your desktop. A gaming desktop is cheaper than a non-gaming desktop PLUS a console. And then there is console tax over games and multi-player, which when accounted, practically compensates the gaming component cost.
Having 2 devices has some advantages, but that's a different matter. PC GPUs can have 7yr life cycles too... if you are happy with 7 yr old settings... which is for most part (console graphics appear to improve over time, partly because the quality of early titles, aside from token exclusives, is poor. The difference is not so great that later titles will get you 1080p instead of 720p) is what you get with consoles anyway. Most recent games, will play on a 8800 (XBOX 360 had a 8800 while the PS3 had a 7800 to compensate the Cell's GPU failings) at 720p and medium to low settings. You only needed a PC refresh in between if you fancied 1080p or more, better physics, textures and tessellation since, that current consoles cannot deliver anyway. In short, PCs *appear* to have shorter life-cycles because *you* want more stuff... because upgrade is an *option*.
Personally, I prefer getting a mid-range GPU, a year after the consoles are released. My GTX 260, inexpensively bought on a sale, has at least another 2 years in it. PC gaming is NOT expensive.
I'll bet they have the most advanced encryption known to man and a private key of 0x4.
Now that it is x86, it may even run Windows this time :-). Think about it... budget gaming PCs... from a modded console.
PC ports: Should be less expensive to develop and optimize now. :-). The irony would be sweet.
PC mods?: If only these can be turned into full desktops. Sony... largest, accidental maker of gaming PCs
Or perhaps PS4 OS on commodity PC hardware, ala Hackintosh. Better forced GPU features for your PS4 games.
Emulation should also be more efficient when PS4 emulators emerge years later.
I stand corrected - it would appear to be Jaguar-based. Quite an... interesting approach by Sony. I guess expecting them to do the logical thing is going contrary to tradition.
Excuse me, but a similarly equiped Windows PC would cost $600. Of course, that would be a Linux PC after the 10 minutes it takes me to install Ubuntu from the USB stick.
And think of all the wonderful games you'll be able to play, like TuxRacer!
I don't think you can get TuxRacer from Steam...
I don't think you can get TuxRacer from Steam...
So it can't even play TuxRacer? lame.
The resolution for TVs will still be 1080p so its not like theres going to be much need for more GPU horsepower and anything more than 30fps is wasted on a TV anyway. Games haven't significantly increased CPU requirements in the past few years and I cant see it changing any time soon.
Games companies don't need anything more than this to churn out CoD14 & Sims7. They're content to throw out one disappointment after another because they know that ultimately the public will buy it.
This is going to be the current level of "console port" for the foreseeable future. To be honest i'm pleasantly surprised. If anything it increases the chances that more console games will make their way to the PC given the similar architecture. I'm just glad they didn't go the other way and use ARM to make ports to mobile platforms easier (or consoles getting the karmic "mobile ports")
I'd also be glad if graphics stagnated in games for the next 6 years. It might force one or two games companies to improve other parts of the games instead like gameplay.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Now don't take me too seriously here:
Bah! Only oversized, ham-fisted goatteed johnny-come-lately-to-gaming-because-of-halo dudebro-gamers prefer the oversized Xbox controller or it's layout. Us real gamers who have been playing since the PSone prefer the Holy Dual Shock.
All friendly taunting aside, I have seen that larger guys do seem to prefer the Xbox controller, personally I can't stand it.
Yes just like how we got an xbox emulator shortly after it's release?
The official press release says the ps4's exact specs.
CPU : x86-64 AMD “Jaguar”, 8 cores
GPU : 1.84 TFLOPS, AMD next-generation Radeon based
Memory : GDDR5 8GB
Optical Drive : BD 6xCAV
www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/130221a_e.pdf
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these, then Sony unilaterally revoking advertised support for Beowulf clusters through a required firmware update.
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I thought that they were manufactured in Japan.
On the consoles, the OS is basically like a "library" rather than a "layer" the game sits on top. That and the OS doesn't constantly swap out your threads and trash registers/L1/L2 in order to run itself. This isn't really a secret.
Price. It will probably cost $500. A similarly equipped Windows PC would be $1,000+
No, no it would not. Jaguar isn't actually out yet, but it's replacing Bobcat so let's take a look at the cost of that. I can get a top of the line Bobcat CPU with 4GB of RAM *in a laptop* for $350 - that's $350 for the complete laptop. Now, granted, it doesn't have the same video card. But if we look at the 1.8 TFLOP number Sony provided, we see that lines up with about the Radeon 7770 - that costs $100. Remove the laptop stuff you don't need (battery, screen, etc...) and add the video card and as a desktop unit you'd probably be looking at about $300-400. In fact you can buy a desktop with 3ghz A-10 APU and 8GB of RAM which will *destroy* the PS4 on the CPU front for $550.
In other words, the random $1,000+ you pulled out your ass is completely made up and has no basis whatsoever in reality. And if the PS4 is priced at $500, that would be a ripoff.
It might force one or two games companies to improve other parts of the games instead like gameplay.
That is more a problem with gamers, not games. As we get older, less things fascinate us. Take any video game of the XX century and compare with a modern game side by side - you'll see how crude and rude that was, yet people tend to rememeber old games fondly for gameplay. But if you start looking for actually good gameplay ideas in games of the past, you'll find that a) most of them have been reimplemented since then, and improved upon b) there was less variety in gameplay back then than it is today. It is astonishing that games fascinated more (comparatively) people in 1980s and 1990s than they are today - probably related to the fact that computers were still new.
Coding etudes
Sony is a Japanese company and PS4 will be manufactured in China. (which is, by the way, country ruled by communist party)
So the only way US could prevent exporting anything, would be by preventing AMD from selling their APUs (manufactured in Taiwan) to Sony.